WEG Reduce Engineering Time by 75% using DriveWorks Pro
WEG reduce engineering time from 4 days to 1 day, with DriveWorks Pro
Headquartered in Jaraguá do Sul, Brazil, WEG operate worldwide with branches in 36 countries and manufacturing plants in 12 countries. Their portfolio of over 600 product lines includes electric motors, generators, transformers, drives and coatings. WEG provide custom solutions for demanding and heavily regulated industry sectors, including oil & gas, marine, mining and energy.
WEG pride itself on its continuous investment in innovation and teamwork. WEG are committed to efficiency, their products, processes and developments are driven by the desire to increase efficiency.
Before Implementing DriveWorks
Typically each contract means a new and often complex product needs to be custom designed, complete with detailed SOLIDWORKS manufacturing data and drawings.
The complexities of a power generator project for an oil platform are huge. As well as meeting the customer specifications, it must also meet a wide range of standards, such as ISO, engineering and manufacturing rules. The designers also have to consider specific rules relating to oxidation if the power generator will be based at sea.
Even with SOLIDWORKS, some customised WEG Energia projects took longer than desired to complete. These projects were liable to non-conformity and often did not include updates requested by manufacturing or the engineering department.
”We were looking for a way to automate our projects. Our first experiences were with algorithms and automated routines using the SOLIDWORKS API. We did achieve some good results but it still used to take a long time and involved many people from other areas such as IT.”
Roberto Vieira, WEG Energia Designer
Rules Based DriveWorks Software Making the Design Process Faster
Calculations, databases, engineering procedures and standards are set up by key users, allowing designers to reuse this captured knowledge every time they need to specify a new custom product.
Designers using DriveWorks can enter values into an interface that is easy to use and understand, and incorporate product improvements from across different departments. They are applied only once to the master product, ensuring that all future products respect the best existing practices.
”With DriveWorks we can create all drawings and manufacturing data within one day. Using SOLIDWORKS alone this process used to take three to four days.”
Carlos Jose Bastos Grillo, Engineering Manager, WEG
Achieving Good ROI, Reducing Errors
WEG achieved a return on investment after just six months on the generator carcass product, the first to be automated. Savings came from reducing rework, errors and development time. Currently 59 designers are DriveWorks users and around 14 automated products are available. Each product can generate several different variations of the same product family.
Improving Products & Innovation
“DriveWorks is a very useful tool which facilitates the application of established criteria to our projects, the continuous improvement of our products and the maintenance of details. New designers without much experience are able to create new products with ease and quality, meeting the most rigorous standards and rules of WEG”
– Robert Vieira, WEG Energia Designer.
”Developed for designers it is easy to set up and doesn’t require any specific programming knowledge”
Roberto Vieira, WEG Energia Designer
See What You Can Achieve with DriveWorks
Explore our online product configurator examples to see the many different ways DriveWorks can be used for design automation and digital selling.
